In year 2001, SOI-Asia project was launched aiming to contribute to higher education in Asian region by utilizing satellite based Internet infrastructure. The project has 27 partner universities and research institutes in 13 Asian countries, and developed Internet environment at each partner site to share the live/archived lectures from Japan and partners. For autonomous operation of the project, each operator should be capable of maintaining the SOI-Asia environment in each partner site. In order to train the operators, during 2002-2005 the project organized 5 SOI-Asia Operator's Workshops and 1 special workshop for TU in the face-to-face style. In year 2006 and 2008, SOI Asia partner universities had jointly organized two "global-e-workshop" which utilizes the distance education environment and employs the virtualization technology and large-scale computing environment(StarBED) to create Asia-wide virtual hands-on workshop environment, together there were 84 engineers from 19 partner universities.

SOI Asia Global-E-Workshop 2011 continues with the global-e-workshop model with self-paced learning support to increase flexibility for participants to participate in the workshop. The workshop learning is blended between live interactive sessions and on-demand self-paced lessons utilizing SOI Asia distance learning environment and virtualization technology for hands-on lab practices.

SOI-Asia Operator's Workshop has following 2 purposes.(1) Participants understand basic of network architecture such as TCP/IP or routing technology, and acquire the knowledge and skills to operate IPv6-based network and SOI-Asia environment.(2) Participants strengthen the partnership and cooperation with each other for the purpose of contributing to future operation of the SOI-Asia projectof the SOI-Asia project.